Welcome to Mere Rhetoric the podcast for
beginners and insiders about the people, terms and movements who
have shaped Rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and I have--

Big news! Thanks the generous support of the
University of Texas Humanities Project, you may notice that this is
a beautiful recording. We’ve got a real microphone and not just my
iPhone and a real editor and not just—me. So it sounds nice, yeah?
That means we’ll be rerecording and rebroadcasting Vintage Mere
Rhetoric in this snazzy, cleaned up and impressive new form as well
as recording all our new episodes this way.

Tell us what you think about the new quality
and suggest new episodes, because summer reruns are what?—the
worst. Our email address is mererhetoricpodcast, all one word, at
gmail. I totally read every email I get and it can change how the
series goes, so that’s internet fame for you.

For instance, remember how listener Greg Gibby
recommended we do a series or a countdown and now we’re counting
down the villians of rhetoric?

In our “Villans of rhetoric” series we met the
taxonomy-obsessed Peter Ramus and the monarchy-loving Thomas
Hobbes. We heard arguments against rhetoric by a cast of
Renaissance naysayers of smooth sayers and the Enlightenment
criticism of rhetoric. Now we have the number one villain of
rhetoric on today’s show.

Okay, so here’s the moment you’ve been waiting
for, who is the villainous villain of rhetoric? Well. Socrates.

P-what? Yes, the guy featured in the Phaedrus,
which not only defended rhetoric, but suggested a broader
application of rhetoric, one that includes the private as well as
the public stage. But while Socrates wants a more inclusive
rhetoric in the phaedrus, in the Gorgias, he vehemnetally
opposes the exclusive, political or demonstrative forms of
rhetoric.

Gorgias is a dialogue writing by plato, which,
like all dialoges is named after the main interlocutor, in this
case the great sophist, Gorgias. Gorgias was a rock star rhetor. He
gave sold-out performances of speeches that were counter intuitive.
We’ll talk more about Gorgias in the future, but for now all you
need to know is he was fabulously wealthy because of his rhetoric
and people wanted to make gold statues of him. So there you have
that.

When Socrates confronts Gorgias about his
field, he’s taking on THE rhetor of the day.

Socrates interrogates Gorgias in order to determine the true
definition of rhetoric, framing his argument around the question
format, "What is X?" (2).[1]
He asks, "…why don’t you tell us yourself what the craft you’re an
expert in is, and hence what we’re supposed to call you?" (449e).
He also challenges Gorgias on the immorality of rhetoric.
Socrates gets Gorgias to admit that “effecting persuasion in the
minds of an audience” is the only function of rhetoric (13).
There’s no sense that rhetorical
thought can lead to any discovery or invention itself—which is
quite different from the view of rhetoric as private as well as
public and inspirational; the view of The Phaedrus. So, rhetoric relies on duping
the non-expert, over an expert (459a). This creates immoral power
differences. How can a teacher teach students to mislead
people?

While it is true that rhetoric is amoral, it
is not true that rhetoric is necessarily immoral. The best analogy
of what rhetoric is in this dialogue is that of the
boxer. This is the
example that Gorgias uses to defned teaching rhetoric—the trainer
of the boxer isn’t responsible for making someone a bruiser and a
bully because that boxer could also use his skills to defend women,
children and small animals.

Gorgias is correct that the teacher is not
ultimately responsible for the student’s morality. But
additionally, the ability to fight well is one that, especially in
Greek culture, was one that was without intrinsic right or wrong.
It is right that people who can fight should fight to defend their
country, their family, or a weak innocent. It is wrong that a
person should use that same set of skills to harm the previously
mentioned groups, in fact the action becomes treason, abuse and
bullying, respectively. But fighting can also be neither good nor
bad, as in the case of boxing exhibitions and competitions, which
is only fighting for entertainment. With rhetoric, it is
similar.

Another metaphor
Gorgias and Scorates argue over is that of cookery. Socrates says
that rhetoric is like good cooking, which makes things pleasant to
the patient, instead of medicine, which tastes terrible, but is
healthy. Nutrition arguments aside, Socrates doesn’t think about
how if cookery could make medicine taste better, the people who
need to take medicine would be more willing to do so. And while
cookery’s capacity to do real good may depend on medicine, without
cookery medicine might not be able to do any good if the patient is
entirely unwilling to take it. This is the smaller argument for
rhetoric that Socrates eventually makes. His view of rhetoric is that it “isn’t
concerned with all speech” (7), isn’t the “only agent of
persuasion” (15), and is only about serving other, deeper
knowledges. Socrates concludes that rhetoric can maybe be okay as
long as it is “used in the service of right,” like an appendage or
ornament (527c).

At the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates
made him promise that he would engage in dialogue (Socrtate’s
speacialty) and not launch into speechmaking, which is Gorgias’
strong point. As usual,, though, Socrates dominates the
conversation while insisting Gorgias is restricted to yes or no
statements. It’s kind of playing dirty.

Eventually Gorgias gets either bored or
frustrated and just leaves Scorates—who can blame him? That leaves
Socrates to debate with Gorgias’ disciples, who are less principled
than their teacher.

First he talks with Polus

Polus states that rhetoric is indeed a craft, but Socrates
replies, "To tell you the truth, Polus, I don't think it's a craft
at all" (462b). The dialogue continues:

"POLUS: So you think oratory's a knack?

SOCRATES: Yes, I do, unless you say it's something else.

POLUS: A knack for what?

SOCRATES: For producing a certain gratification and pleasure"
(462c).

Socrates continues to argue that rhetoric is not an art, but
merely a knack: "…it guesses at what's pleasant with no
consideration for what's best. And I say that it isn't a craft, but
a knack, because it has no account of the nature of whatever things
it applies by which it applies them, so that it’s unable to state
the cause of each thing" (465a).

Callicles is a Neizche in embryo. He argues that might
makes might and
that suffering wrong is worse than doing it. He says enslaving
people, killing and pillaging is only by convention shameful, and
it is not wrong by nature. Nature says that if you can take it, you
should take it. Pretty much he’s a bully.

There’s an argument implied by the way that Socrates begins by
debating someone who is benevolent, if a little spacy and then by
following his students and colleagues discovers that those who
follow rhetoric’s precepts eventually descend into immoral
cruely.

This dialogue had HUGE influence on the
attitudes towards rhetoric. All the good platonists said, “nope, I
can’t like rhetoric—it’s tricky and not universal and leads to
tyranny.” In fact, most of our villians of rhetoric have directly
mentioned Socrates as a source for why rhetoric is immoral, or else
they have alluded to his same arguments about the lawlessness,
fickleness or violence of rhetoric. Strangely, a lot of Socrates’ claims later
show up in Phaedrus’ mouth, so he ends up contradicting himself
later in the Phaedrus.

Also
Aristotle and Cicero will have to respond to the claims that
Socrates makes in the Gorgias about the social use of
rhetoric—Cicero especially demands the kind of expertise in other
topics that Socrates claims is missing. To be fair, Socrates’
complaints against rhetoric seem valid. But just that he’s
attacking what we might see as the very worst of bad rhetoric,
which leaves him open to change his position in the Phaedrus to
accept a new definition of rhetoric.

About the Podcast

A podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that have defined the history of rhetoric.